• “Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be?”
• “A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.” Tom Fotherby’s Blog

Some people have opinions nobody agrees with because they’re stale, but some people with old opinions dedicate themselves to making them true. These are often people who have no time for the opinions of others. Other people have opinions they just got from social media, or out of a self-help book, and will have new ones tomorrow, but are they any worse for that? Such people are the ones alert to other opinions, ultimately worthless though they may be.

On the other hand, there are some enlightened opinions which need to be protected from the market, aren’t there? One doing the rounds implies that the hoi polloi are not qualified to decide what’s good for them, and so it is ‘absolutely’ wrong to let public broadcasting and the arts and culture sector, for example, battle for survival in a user-pays economy. We may lose our cultural identity.

As we apply our five-minute attention span to the election campaign, and the task of filtering in turn the social and commercial media filters on the complexities of who should be funded by our borrowed money, this emu has his head in old opinions about the Moon, asking himself questions you might expect from someone with his bum in the air.

It is a cliche of astrology that the Full Moon realizes the purpose imported from its New interplay with the Sun, in a synthesis of head and heart at the opposite side of the Zodiac reconciling apparent contradictions and opposites. For those who opine that life is a journey, with a beginning, middle and end, this is a resonant model of enlightenment, a geometrical representation of self-realization.

In these terms, and from a southern hemisphere tropical perspective, the Moon has been mulling over the moral implications of opportunity since its conjunction in Aries with a strong-willed Sun inspired by assertiveness, tending unfortunately to aggression, according to the character of northern hemisphere natives born in early winter. How might the Moon in Scorpio, dipping below the western horizon in the seventh house, especially now that his reflection is of an ego which has moved on into a semblance of mastery in close-quarters winter interaction, synthesize those implications?We all occupy forward positions, with death in front of us, and behind us in the trenches a card game of autonomous bodily betrayal and a sergeant we don’t trust. Consumption and self-realization are at odds. If we weren’t so hungry, for amusement, for diversity, for change, and above all for self-realization, we might satisfy ourselves with the mastery of something, and take a secure context to our graves, but fat chance of that.

In the context of the political chaos we face as the Moon wheels into the mind of Scorpio, I get the impression that his self-realization is as compliant and superficial as ours. The anxiety which underlies the ethics of opportunity avails itself of a healthy dose of humour, and a relativist perspective, in order simply to get on with other people similarly assailed by the universal predicament, too many options.

Opportunism can be moralistically defined as a weakness of character betraying the common good, or simply as the use of an opportunity for personal gain which may or may not adequately weigh consequences. But suspend judgment. The common good is a temporary opinion. We are all rescued from indecision by choice of the most immediately appealing option. Ideology gets no more than five minutes, like everybody else. The only universal is the particular, and the particular is dissolved in the universal.

What we have complied with is the deconstruction of universal standards of measure, but while that may make us ungovernable, eternally dissatisfied, there is good reason to congratulate the dilettante. My Moon for one is less constrained by human needs and expectations and does what he feels like. A rock in space is leading the charge to identity transcendence!

Here is the clock at the moment of ‘full moon’.The houses which determine the state of the mechanism, and the surrounding stars, are but my local perspective. All those geographical regions are where the hour hand is at the top, and indicate the infinite possibilities which the Moon enjoys. He may be precisely located in a vedic nakshatra, but his choice of wives is limitless. And how is his contiguity with the stars measured? What qualities does he show above and below the terrestrial equator? Are these qualities tropical or sidereal? Are they definable? Does it matter? He’s off on a romp which puts things, especially houses, in perspective.
This chart dissolves the particular in the universal, but perhaps you have to have more of a connection to sky rotation than most people to get it. Without the innate awareness of the relations of Sun position and time of day which people who work outside acquire, sense of direction is lost without landmarks. I suspect that the common experience of the Sun’s hourly movement is back in the Stone Age. Ask yourself: do I see the Sun moving across a fixed sky, or do I see the sky moving, or myself?

I have to say that I cherish local perspective, even when it’s the dark interior of a hole in the ground. I came to astrology as a stargazer, and the algorithms of Southern Hemisphere Astrology evolved out of years researching celestial mechanics. The adherence ‘downunder’ to historical northern hemisphere interpretations of the Moon’s nodes (the draconic month)–appearances are downside up in the south–was merely the bait. My abiding intention is to encourage my grandchildren and you to go outside and have a look. I hope once in a lifetime you will stay at least half an hour to experience sky movement.

What is enlightened opinion to one person may seem like prejudice to another. Astrology is bedevilled by the problem of measurement. In what common frame of reference ought aspects be measured? The recent conjunction of Jupiter and the Moon which looked like an ear-ring was entrancing, because the two were vertically, not ecliptically, aligned across the whole (fixed) sky. What orb, or time-frame, reduces the shift of the seasons in relation to the stars, or of the stars in relation to each other, to insignificance? What are the local seasons? Can they be divided geometrically? Can it be believed that two people born an hour apart are ‘ruled’ by different signs? How can the Moon be Full when you can’t see it?How does a locality attain community without established and mutually respected perspectives? How can it develop better educational and employment outcomes in a continuously changing economy, as fresh opinions do battle with stale ones and vice versa, when voters cannot tolerate each other’s opinions on social inclusion and sustainability, let alone apply common standards of mathematical and linguistic excellence, which are the tools of any kind of insight and management?

None of this speaks to me of a definable moment in the unfolding of human consciousness. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you deserve pity if you get to the end of your life having lived it as a journey with a destination, and realize that it was a musical and your only opportunity to sing and dance. By any measure, ‘we’ are in a mess, but enjoy the moment.